Day One hundred and eight - What have you done?

From now on, I'll be talking about a number of different people that I've had in my life, and my goal is to be as fair to them as I can. Some I will sing their praises, some others I fear I won't have enough in me to describe just how harmful they turned out to be - for me, at least. They might have become the world to someone else, but to me they became just another metric ton of pain my soul had to carry. Now take Claudia, for instance : what we had was good, and all too brief, but intense as well, and though in the end it was sad - certainly for me, I wouldn't say the same for her because I never knew either way, I hold no grudges towards her. No, we were young, and we needed to make certain mistakes, we needed to go through some things to get our lives going to the next stage. We didn't remain friends, because we only saw each other maybe twice, and that was back in 2006 already, but Claudia will always be someone I think of very fondly. Some others, I do not think at all, some others still hurt when I think of them, but such is life. 

So after Claudia, I naturally felt hurt, and I felt lost once more - all these things were still too new, too raw to me. Again, I found myself delving deeper into my work life. I was always with someone at work whose company I enjoyed, and that made the hours easy to bear. I really liked the dynamics of that team back then - things weren't beginning to get awful yet. In a year or so they would, but not yet. One of the regulars there was this goth kid - I won't name him, because he was known by a very specific handle, but for this story's sake I'll call him 'John'. Now, this kid 'John' was an interesting cat - something like a very fat Neo from the Matrix, always clad in black from head to toe, even in summer. But he was definitely an interesting guy. I got to know a lot of music I'd just been getting into myself through him and his cadre of cybergoths. And among that cadre was one girl, and maybe I'd already seen her before in one of the goth bars I sometimes went to, or maybe she too was a regular at the store - I've always been mostly oblivious to such things; even when/if I had girls plainly flirting with me, this stuff just flew over my head. And believe me, I'm not full of myself, not by a longshot, but this version of me with the long hair, and the rows of hoop earrings on either side, and the fact that I was in good enough shape, did make me something of a desirable object. Maybe I was too dumb to notice most of the time, but not always. Not always.

And so it came to pass that a few short weeks after me and Claudia had split up, I was meeting someone who I mostly regret ever having met : Ana.